


eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase

by zempasuchil



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-20
Updated: 2009-09-20
Packaged: 2017-10-18 13:12:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zempasuchil/pseuds/zempasuchil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, when Hodgins is peering through the microscope at spores of aspergillus fumigatus, Angela brings it up again. "It's like he has x-ray vision and he's looking at your bones."</p>
            </blockquote>





	eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase

**Author's Note:**

> Season 1&2\. opening text from The Headless Witch in the Woods (2.10); title from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

  
_Hodgins: "Remember The Shining?"  
Zack: "My palms perspired profusely during that film."  
Hodgins laughs_

He remembers that too, finding Zack's slippery hand between them on the couch when that axe appears. Because he's a nice guy, Hodgins pretends he's as scared as Zack is and clutches as hard. To make the guy feel better. It's a scary movie, after all; when he first saw it as a kid that part freaked him out too.

But when he watches those kids' Witch documentary evidence with Angela her hands don't sweat, they are as perfect and smooth as she looks, as she _is_ , and it drives him nuts because he could never hope to be anything like good enough for that. She's something ethereal and soft and utterly feminine and he can't imagine he'd ever be this lucky. When he tells her, she blushes delicately, and makes a joke to wave away his attention. He's okay with that. He knows what she means.

-

The way Zack looks at him makes him shiver. Angela sees it and scolds, "Stop it," and Zack says "What?" right before Hodgins wrenches the conversation away from the subject.

Later, when Hodgins is peering through the microscope at spores of _aspergillus fumigatus,_ Angela brings it up again. "It's like he has x-ray vision and he's looking at your _bones_."

"We do a lot of that around here."

"But you're not _dead_ yet. He shouldn't look at you like that."

Jack looks over at Zack, who is preoccupied with something on his clipboard and biting his lip, furrowing his brow. "He can look at me however he wants," he murmurs, and it's true. He'll take the intensity of Zack's x-ray gaze for all it's worth, because it's worth a lot, because Zack only looks at people like that when he wants to get to know every millimeter of them. Jack himself spends time sifting through mud looking for mud so he knows what scrutiny means from a labbie, and he tells Angela so.

"Whatever happened to an appreciative gaze?" she asks, a little bitter.

In response, Jack just looks at her, eyes blue and wide and innocent as the sky, and she blushes, smiles, looks away. "You've always been a work of art to me," he says, and she looks back, because with words they're safe, words are the ground they've treat for years, words don't let the bottom drop out from under you and send your heart into your mouth like silence does.

-

When Zack says he lives above Hodgins's garage, this isn't strictly true. All his stuff is there, and that's where he works on his dissertation when he's not at the Jeffersonian, but he spends a lot of time on Jack's couch. They watch basketball together, and hockey when Zack pouts enough.

"I'm not pouting," Zack says. "I'm presenting a rational argument."

"Yeah, yeah. There is no reason in the world for me to actually want to watch hockey."

Zack sticks out his lower lip. After a few moments of silence punctuated by ref whistles and crowd yells, Zack leans over and whispers in his ear, "I'd be willing to participate in an economy of satisfaction." The tickle of breath against his ear gives Jack goosebumps.

"What exactly -"

In answer, Zack moves his hand over Jack's suddenly twitching cock and just lets it lie there, warm and heavy. Jack gasps, breath shuddering.

Before he can elaborate, Zack finds himself pinned to the couch and straddled by his landlord-slash-coworker-slash-television-buddy, who is also kissing him within an inch of his life.

-

Most of the time they spend together at work is when Hodgins wants to come over and help him whack some clay slabs with assorted bludgeoning or cutting instruments. Of course they have their own stations and tasks but Hodgins is good at wandering. He's good at visiting, and Zack is good at working, and they're both very good at using experiments to make discoveries, or, as he thinks of it to himself, playing engineer in the sandbox.

He told Zack that once, but he thinks Zack got offended because he just told Hodgins to get to work. He didn't mean to belittle engineering or anything. He just thinks there's no shame in having fun with Spam.

-

He doesn't realize this but Zack takes economy seriously.

"Zack, you don't have to do that."

"But it's fair."

"Shut up, Zack, this is not about fair, this is -" He grasps Zack's wrist. "This is you and me. Can't we be open?"

"I didn't think you wanted to be open about this. Won't Angela leave you?"

Hodgins splutters and gapes like a fish. "I think.." he says, "I think she is very open to, um. Possibilities."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means that if she cares, she'll want in on it."

"This economy?"

"No!" he says, shaking Zack's wrists now and looking him straight in his nervous eyes. "This isn't - that's not what I want, Zack, that's - I want _you_. I don't want any stupid exchange. I just want to give you something, and, and if you want to, you can give me things too. Can't this just be us? "

"Not if there's Angela."

"Well. Yeah." But Zack looks more relaxed, calmer, less... distant. And Hodgins is smiling, and this makes Zack's lips twitch up a little, and he hazards a guess that they're going to be okay.

-

When they pulled him out of the dirt Zack remembers his own hands looked the same next to Angela's hands, digging in dust, through the haze of tears. Zack doesn't like impressionism on principle but he likes it in his gut. It's a precision of imprecision, that representation is strictly what is seen and not the ideas of what is real. It makes him feel weird, knowing that what his eyes show him isn't as plain as it always looks. Approaching the world with ideas only misguides you, though, which is why you should never work with assumptions, like Dr. Brennan says. This is probably also why his drawings on the bad days are all wrong: because he's trying to think about things. His drawings on the good days are when he remembers how not to jump to conclusions.

What he's saying is that he kind of understands art, sometimes. At this stammered confession, devotion, prayer, gift, Angela's eyes fill with something and she touches his forehead, brushing imaginary fringe from his eyes. "That's beautiful, Zack," she says, and it's sort of like when she says _You're sweet, thank you,_ or the way Hodgins touched his hand when Zack hurt it punching him.

-

Once Jack told her she was out of this world, when he's showing her a Hubble photograph of the rose nebula, and she giggled and teased, asking him if he's calling her an extraterrestrial. If that's why he's so into her, because he wants to discover her secrets about interplanetary travel.

He teased back, pretending offense at harassment for his fundamental beliefs, but really he was just too afraid to say _Yes, I think you hold the key to secrets of the universe._ Because it was true. But Angela doesn't like people reading her for secrets, and he doesn't, ever, want to look too hard at her if it makes her disappear like a mirage.

-

Zack looks at her like that sometimes, like he wants to chart her, measure her, dissolve her, and sometimes she catches him and snaps at him and it hurts both of them. But. But sometimes, she shows him something she's made, and he likes it, and even though his appreciation involves an explanation of chaos theory or the Fibonacci sequence the look on her face for just that means the world.

Zack looks at her like that sometimes and Jack wants to say, _mine_. But when she looks back and kisses him on the cheek Hodgins knows he can hardly claim either of them. There are reaches to them that he cannot begin to grasp and connections that even they can barely understand.

-

Angela grasps with artist's hands, a gentle fleeting grasp, a tenacious caress, a hard fluid movement like she is sculpting him, and Zack does not close his eyes and cups the back of her head, runs his hand down to feel the curve of her neck and spine. This is what it boils down to: immediacy and experience, sense and cataloging, charting and pressing the existence of every molecule. It's the most intensely immediate physical encounter Jack has ever seen, and he swallows hard, mouth suddenly dry. They are utterly absorbed in mapping out each other's bodies, and when Zack opens his mouth Jack reaches in and puts a thumb over his swollen pink lips. At this, Zack closes his eyes, and unwittingly leans into every touch of their skin. He presses a kiss to his mouth, and thinks that he's found one reliable way to quiet a Zack, chuckling into Zack's warm wet open mouth.

-

It is a selfish thought but one that he needs: Angela will never envelop him,will never cover his whole being, will never drown him, will never bury him alive. Neither will Zack. They are light like feathers, and soft, and sometimes he takes selfish refuge in knowing that he is the hardest, heaviest, most immovable thing around. When they lie there, hair spread like nets on pillows, skin on skin, the afterglow is warm and bright enough that Hodgins isn't afraid to fall asleep because their outstretched cradling arms will catch him.


End file.
